The wealth gap between whites and African Americans increased more than 4 times, from $20,000 to $95,000.

Middle income white households had greater gains in financial assets than high income African Americans; by 2007, they had accumulated $74,000, whereas the average high income African American family owned only $18,000.

At least 25% of African American families had no assets at all to turn to in times of economic hardship.

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The Washington Post has an article up on African American unemployment rates: “Blacks hit hard by economy’s punch“. The numbers are particularly bad for young African American males:

Joblessness for 16-to-24-year-old black men has reached Great Depression proportions — 34.5 percent in October, more than three times the rate for the general U.S. population. And last Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that unemployment in the District, home to many young black men, rose to 11.9 percent from 11.4 percent, even as it stayed relatively stable in Virginia and Maryland.

The period from 1970 to the present was one of tremendous socioeconomic change. The United States became a vastly more unequal society over this period. . . . By the present time, we are more unequal in terms of income and wealth than any time since 1929. It’s as if all the equalizing policies of the New Deal have been wiped out, and in fact, many of those policies have been wiped out.

In other words, the average person is more likely to live in a neighborhood with others that are also poor than was the case in the past. As the author of the article puts it:

whereas in 1970, the average poor person lived in a neighborhood that was about 13 percent poor, by 1990 the average poor person lived in a neighborhood that was 28 percent poor.

Massey recommends that we need to consider more seriously the intersection of both race and class if we are to understand issues of segregation.

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Comedian and talk show host Jimmy Kimmel, who is white, visits an African American barber shop to talk about handshakes and race. The piece suggests that norms we use to greet others vary by race. I wonder what consequences such differences might have for casual interaction across racial boundaries.

Later, Jamie Foxx appears on Kimmel’s show and they continue on the same topic.

If such differences are widespread, to what extent might it help to be more open and up front about their existence and possible consequences?

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Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., was arrested in his own home on suspicion of breaking and entering. According to a story from The Washington Post, Gates described his experience as:

part of a “racial narrative” playing out in a biased criminal justice system. Shortly before the charge against him was dropped this afternoon, the Harvard professor who has spent much of his life studying race in America said he has come to feel like a case study.

“There are one million black men in jail in this country and last Thursday I was one of them,” he said in an interview with The Washington Post Tuesday morning. “This is outrageous and that this is how poor black men across the country are treated everyday in the criminal justice system. It’s one thing to write about it, but altogether another to experience it.”

According to the story, a neighbor called the police to report that two Black men were trying to force their way into Gates’s house (he’d had trouble getting the front door open after returning from a trip to China). Even after showing the police his I.D. that included his picture with his home address on it, he was still arrested, placed in handcuffs, taken to the police station, and placed in a jail cell.

According to the article, the experience has inspired his idea for his next PBS documentary:

His next project on race, he said, will be rooted in his arrest. “I hope to make a documentary about racial profiling for PBS,” he said. “[The idea] had never crossed my mind but it has now.”

He said the documentary will ask: “How are people treated when they are arrested? How does the criminal justice system work? How many black and brown men and poor white men are the victims of police officers who are carrying racist thoughts?

An interview with Gates about the experience appears on The Root, a site for which he is the Editor-in-Chief.

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The New York Times has an article up, “A Prom Divided” about the continuing tradition of racially segregated proms. Here’s a snippet:

Racially segregated proms have been held in Montgomery County — where about two-thirds of the population is white — almost every year since its schools were integrated in 1971. Such proms are, by many accounts, longstanding traditions in towns across the rural South, though in recent years a number of communities have successfully pushed for change. When the actor Morgan Freeman offered to pay for last year’s first-of-its-kind integrated prom at Charleston High School in Mississippi, his home state, the idea was quickly embraced by students — and rejected by a group of white parents, who held a competing “private” prom. (The effort is the subject of a documentary, “Prom Night in Mississippi,” which will be shown on HBO in July.)

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About Me

My name is Jon Witt. I think everyone needs sociology! This site is dedicated to providing links to sociological stories, research, ideas, data, and more. I also created it to accompany my books, SOC and The Big Picture: A Sociology Primer.